We left Denver for Chicago on the 28th of June at ten in the morning on one of the great transcontinental trains, which was full of children who had been born just before the war or during the fighting and were on their way to the summer camps of the East. The girls wore summer hats, dresses, and, sometimes, gloves. The boys were no less inconvenienced in dress shirts and, sometimes, ties, even though the air on the plains of Kansas was simple and hot. Despite their uncomfortable clothing and automatic politeness to adults (they treated anyone over five feet tall like a policeman), these children may have been the last generation with a life of its own—the last to know America as an infinity of regions and refuges hard to reach and safe to the touch, the last to understand the United States in the plural.
My heart swelled at the sight of these children, the girls in their white summer hats and the boys in bow-ties. It was an achingly pleasant feeling—paternal, maternal, parental—that I am afraid Constance did not share. I know this now, after having seen during the past thirty years various newspaper and magazine accounts of her marriages and misadventures, but I did not know it then, for I had read everything into her that I deeply wanted. Even she did not know at the time, enough to say or even to think privately, that she did not want children. She had yet to say to me, as she did in one of the last of her sentences that I was to hear, "The truth is, I prefer jazz to children," and she was not that fond of jazz.
All this began to find expression that morning when we boarded the train and I was still harvesting vast amounts of strength from the landscape. I was looking at the wheat, still green, outside the window, and at Constance. She was so lovely when her eyes fastened upon the horizon, and, having come down from the mountains and the thin air, we were elated by all the extra oxygen on the plain. I knew that this would carry us for a week, and that the month and a half in the saddle and in the wind could, if we let it, carry us for the rest of our lives.
It was the heart of the country, at the height of summer, in an age of innocence. I knew almost everything I know now, but it was pure and uncorrupted. If innocence sometimes has a bad name, it is only among those who do not or cannot remember purity.
I was deeply in love with Constance and taken up with the greater rhythms of life—the slow oscillations that make themselves felt through generations or longer and that you must have a span of some years even to comprehend. It was hot and bright, and the sound of wheels and rails stitched together the heat and the light. I was about to make love to Constance as I had never made love to anyone before, all the way from Kansas to Chicago and at the risk of twenty heart attacks.
Reaching across the gap of facing seats in our compartment, I took both her hands. She was surprised, but she lifted her arms. As she did so her neck and shoulders became irresistibly defined. I drew her to me and she made the beautiful adjustments that a woman makes, usually drawing in a breath, before you kiss her, speaking with her eyes and moving her lips almost as if to speak. Her hair was golden all about her neck. Her teeth were white as I have never seen since. She closed her eyes. I kissed her, and, as I began to go under, I thought that the next thing I would know as a mortal man would be the sudden change of sound as the train rolled into Union Station in Chicago and we rushed to pull on our dishevelled clothes.
Still, even in prolonged ecstasy, you have to breathe. And with her first breath after the first long kiss, Constance said, "There's nothing I'd like more now than a good cup of hot coffee."
When fish are pulled from the deep and find themselves in the greater light and substanceless air, they are stunned. Many fishermen, perhaps to spare them the heartbreak of having left a world of flowing emerald, strike the heads of their prey against the deck. Such fish then assume my expression after Constance's amazing declaration.
"I think they grind it freshly on the train. You know, they may even roast it on the train. I saw one of the kitchen boys pouring what looked like coffee beans into what could have been a roaster. Can you call the porter?"
I, who could not move, stared at her like a dinosaur in amber. She, as if suddenly possessed by the devil, chattered at the speed of a gunshot about what she called "varietals."
"I myself love the piquant, racy, wild aromas of Arabian Sanani," she said, "but Daddy's favorites were the Ethiopians. He had a man from Fortnum and Mason go twice a year to the Abyssinian Highlands to bring back Sidamo, Yergacheffe, and Harrar. I'll have to look in Daddy's Rolodex to find the man's name. I'm going crazy with longing for Yergacheffe, but I'll take anything they've got. Call the porter, won't you? Call him now. I don't want to wait. I can't wait."
We rolled over much of Kansas before I was able to speak. "That's funny," I said.
"What's funny?"
"You know."
"No, I don't. What's funny?"
"What you said about coffee."
"What's funny about it?"
"You've never mentioned coffee. You don't drink coffee. And you know that I can't sit in the same room where coffee is served. You know that we go to restaurants only in summer, so we can sit outdoors."
She looked bemused. As she collected her thoughts, I began to panic. "I wasn't aware," she said in her mode of rational argumentation, "that your rejection of coffee was either categorical or ideological."
"It's not," I said. "I just think that coffee is a substitute for sex, exercise, a healthy diet, getting enough sleep, being happy in one's life, having a purpose, and having a brain." I took the bait. What a fool I am. Now, of course, I know. She simply did not want to have children.
"Well," she said, indignantly. "Most people haven't had the privilege of leading your freakish life. They suffer. Give them their daily caffeine."
"Freakish? Who's freakish? Wouldn't you call having a few billion dollars at least semifreakish? I started life as a messenger, a runner, a handcuffed and straitjacketed detainee in a Swiss mental asylum. I made my way through life with iron will. My father didn't have a big-game lodge in Africa. I didn't take wildebeest sandwiches to school, Or dancing lessons with Nijinsky. Constance, I love you more than anything in the world," I said, and I did, "but you say things like, Right now, I'd like nothing better than some giraffe top round, and you think you're just being an all-American girl. You don't know what suffering is."
I thought that when I said "I love you more than anything in the world," and my voice cracked with emotion, she would throw herself into my arms. Instead, she got teary-eyed, held back, and sallied forth.
"I do so know what suffering is," she declared.
"Really."
"Yes."
"Tell me," I bid her.
She drew in her upper lip and furrowed her brows. After five minutes of silence, she said, "Grandfather Lloyd was on the Titanic."
"You weren't even born then."
"I cried when they told me, and I feel his suffering deep in my heart when I look in his face."
"He survived?"
"Of course. They had lifeboats."
"Constance," I said, "I love you. Let me make love to you, now. I've never loved you more than in these past weeks, and in these weeks never more than at this moment. Come to me." I held out my hands. I could feel great force pushing us together, and the force that pulled us apart. The flux between the two was magnificent and terrifying.
She remained motionless. I stared at her face as the light of half a continent glinted from her sled-dog eyes and her silvery blond hair, and I felt the great weight of her soul drawing away from me the way an enormous ship slowly separates from a pier. The space between us was as tortured and perturbed as the aurora. To reach for her, I realized, I would have to cross nebulae, galaxies, and ethers.
"You can't tell me what to do," she said.
"I'm not telling you what to do."
"Good. I'm going to get a cup of coffee." She rose to her feet.
Perhaps she wanted me to spring to the door, block it with my body, and embrace her. Perhaps I should have, but she had set it up so that I could not. Her annou
ncement about getting a cup of coffee broke my heart, and what argument is left with someone you love if she is willing to break your heart?
"You would think," she said, poised to exit, "that I was leaving you for a masseur. I'm just going to get a cup of coffee. I'll be back."
She was gone for twenty minutes, during which I felt the same torture and despair as I might have had she made love to every acrobat in South America. And when she returned, her drugged elation drove me down deep.
That satanic substance makes you smile at tragedy. It turns your inner self into a happy sparkling clockwork, hypnotizes you with artificial joy, and takes from you the sadness and deliberation that are the anchors of love.
She, however, was more than content. She was ecstatic, delighted, absolutely ready to forgive and forget, to let the whole thing pass. She wanted to have sex. I could see that she felt it down to her fingertips. She was exploding with sex. It would have shaken the train right off the rails, half the women in Africa would have refrained from pounding their manioc, clocks would have stopped from Newfoundland to Azerbaijan, Einstein's General Theory would have been confirmed, and the Bank of England would have put donuts in the lobby.
"No," I said. "The sex that I see dancing through every atom of your body has been unleashed by a drug, a crystal, a substance."
"So?" she asked, aching for every part of me to run through every part of her. I, too, wanted to create a magnetic earthquake on the plains of Kansas that would make the Bank of England put donuts in the lobby, to stop clocks, to be a god, if only for a moment. But there is only one God, and for all other illusions and presumptions the price is steep.
Part of the near-invincibility of this drug is that it can switch sleds on the most precipitous slope of the mountain. Constance suddenly lost interest in having sex, and sought instead intellectual banter facile and quick enough to keep pace with her racing blood. The drug affects neither substance nor appreciation, but only pacing. I think she would have been just as satisfied in her caffeine cloud to have drummed her fingers or typed someone's term paper, as long as the timing was insistent and complex, as long as she had had the sense of rolling forward relentlessly. At that moment, however, her ecstasy masqueraded as tolerance for compulsive disputation. Without missing a beat, she began to talk like a lawyer's letter.
"Tell me, then," she commanded, "what it is, specifically, that underlies your objection to coffee. You do realize of course that in view of the habits and practices of the world, the burden of proof is on you. Most people drink coffee. Of those who don't you are perhaps the only one who objects." Again she looked at me as if she did not know me. "Or at least you are the only one who objects with such ... with such..."
"Vehemence," I supplied.
"Yes. Vehemence. You stand alone."
"I know."
"So, tell me what you have discovered. Illuminate your feelings. What is their origin? I'll listen."
"Might you not," I asked, "knowing that this is the way I am, merely give me a gift?"
"Nothing inexplicable ever lasts."
"Nothing," I said, "except love and beauty, which are totally inexplicable and totally everlasting. Or were."
"But why?" she asked, truly puzzled. "Why coffee?"
I snorted, and sat back with a hurt look. With the patience of the destroyed, I said, "I hate coffee."
"I know you do."
"Coffee is bad."
"I know you think coffee is bad."
"Yes. It's very bad."
"Why?"
"I haven't prepared a diatribe," I said because at that time I hadn't. Since then I have developed a number of them. They run from thirty seconds to an hour and three quarters.
"Just tell me what comes to mind," she said.
"You think I'm crazy."
"No. I don't think you're crazy, but I love coffee and you act as if, if I drink a cup of coffee, I've betrayed you. What's going on?"
"You love coffee," I said. "Love should not be given to a substance."
"That's ridiculous. It's like saying, I love roasted chicken."
"Would that it were, but when you said you loved coffee, your voice dropped an octave and a half, there was a caesura of numb passion after the very word, and you moved as if you had been caressed by a male succubus."
"You mean an incubus."
"Whatever kind of bus. But when you said that you loved roasted chicken, the love was a half-note expressed in the same range as the other words around it, with neither pause nor handsome incubus."
"The incubus is handsome?"
"Yes."
"You've seen him?"
"No, I've seen you as you see him."
She affectionately said my name. And then she said, "You're insane."
"On the contrary," I stated. "People who drink coffee are insane. Insane and possessed and, what is worse, willing to be possessed. Most people in asylums drink coffee. If you let them stop drinking it, they would regain enough equanimity to leave. But, no, they don't stop. In fact, they drink more and more, and they get crazier and crazier. They're dehumanized with every single goddamned drop, and although they sense it, they're like lemmings, or buffalo who jump off cliffs. People drink coffee and it makes them insane.
"Must you drink coffee? Why not cocoa, tea, cola tea, maté, yoco infusion, or guaraña? Why caffeine? Why not theobromine or theophylline? I have had an occasional square of chocolate. It is the cause of uncontrolled ecstasy, but, afterward, you sink into Promethean despair.
"Note," I demanded, "that caffeine was introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century, post-Renaissance. Why is it, do you think, that the art of the Renaissance and the classical period has never been surpassed? The great heights were reached on angels' wings, not via a filthy corruption brewed from a bean that poisons its own tree.
"Yes, coffee plants are self-poisoning. The beans drop on the ground and, after ten or twenty-five years ... sayonara! Don't tell me that flirtation with an addictive poison is salutary. I suppose you haven't heard of the coffee adulteration scandals of the early nineteenth century. You know what they put in ground coffee to bulk it up?"
"What?" Constance asked, her eyes wide.
"Roots, nuts, acorns, rocks, baked horse liver, clays, ground peanut shells, copra, sisal, feathers, and pig shit. And no one knew. How would they have known? They were already Hogarthian zombies who professed allegiance to ... to what? To a king? To a messiah? To a belief? To what? To what? Not even to a false messiah or to a usurping pretender, not even to a wrong idea or a hypnotic creed. But to a bean, a bean, a bean, bean, bean!"
"What would you do, outlaw it?"
"Why not? De Valera tried to ban tea in Ireland. Why did he have to stop there?"
I went on, defending the light against the overwhelming darkness. "Caffeine, Constance, is similar to the genetic code."
"It is?"
"Yes, C8H10N4O2. 3,7-dihydro-1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dione. As you know, DNA duplicates itself, but caffeine interrupts this holy process like a typhoon blasting all the punts on the River Isis, and explodes the genetic system. Caffeine replaces adenosine at the receptor sites of the neurons, causing the neurons themselves to fire at untenable rates. This usurpation and its unbridled effects, its attack upon the balance of nature, its liberation of the fire and light that serve as the battering ram of the soul, is a sin of the highest order.
"It causes sterility in insects," I declared.
"What about humans?" Constance asked. "Humans are not insects."
"That's correct," I told her. "In fact, to be honest, in making sperm more motile, it actually promotes human fertility. Is this fair?"
"Why not?"
"Only the dullard sperm, the caffeine-using sperm, the addiction-prone sperm, get to use outboard motors. The virtuous sperm that won't accept the outboard motors don't get to the egg, and since the outboard motors, so to speak, are left outside the wall of the egg, what is it that gets in? A weakling, a dullard, a dunce, a non-swimmer, a
tailless basket case, a slovenly jerk that got upstream because it had an Evinrude strapped to its back. Spengler missed this point entirely in understanding what ails the West."
"My dear," she said, "my dearest one...."
"The greatest per capita consumption of coffee in the world is in Finland. True, they held back the Russians, but they're the most nervous people on earth, no one understands their language, and they beat themselves with branches. The average American drinks seven hundred and twenty gallons of liquid a year, of which approximately half is coffee. That is, one gallon, or sixteen cups, per day. Three percent of the population drink fifty cups a day, and fifteen percent drink forty. Sixty-seven percent of American adults and twenty-three percent of children are dependent on caffeine or various coffee acids."
"Darling...."
"Catherine the Great used one pound of coffee to four cups of water, which is, quite frankly, why she screwed horses, and, look, five thousand milligrams of caffeine by mouth is fatal. Someone once committed suicide by means of a coffee enema. Don't you see? What if you lost count of your cups of coffee? You could die. And all this has been known for ages, ever since its introduction. Way back then, William Corbett called caffeine 'a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age.'
"Constance, listen to me. Trust me. I know whereof I speak and, in this, I assure you, I am totally unbiased."
Silence descended for the rest of the trip. Only in Chicago did I speak, when a derelict in Union Station politely asked me for a nickel so he could buy a cup of coffee. "Go fuck yourself!" I screamed, so powerfully that it echoed several times under the high ceiling and made flocks of illicit pigeons fly from their roosts.
Language like that was not tolerated in public then, and the Chicago police—who for some reason dress like taxi drivers—began to move in on me, but Constance turned them back with the disapproving scowl of a true billionairess.